By purchasing a Mac mini server, the extra hard drive is nice but you sacrifice the DVD drive. This might be a deal breaker depending on what else you plan to use this home server for. You can always add an external one, but that is extra cost and hassle. Again, it's a trade-off.

It sounds pointless for me to use it as it only seems to add centralized management interface (don't know how I missed that link). I'm guessing that Server would be nice for a small business needing Web hosting, wiki hosting, calendar server, mail server, etc. My purposes are primarily for: attaching a firewire 800 external RAID5 enclosure, using as a central iTunes/AppleTV server, recording ATSC TV, and running a cctv monitor. I'll probably use Apache for internal things, but nothing that can't be done with the standard OS. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something really cool.
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Donald HughesApr 7 '10 at 0:43

You're doing exactly what I'm going for. Right now, I'm running Ubuntu with a RAID1 array for data. After a disappointingly complex adventure in setting up AFP on Ubuntu and now that I've outgrown my RAID1 array and am looking to expand beyond a pair of disks, I'm looking at alternatives. The only thing I found disappointing about the Mac Mini is the lack of eSata, but when the drives are primarily shared over a network it makes little difference if it's eSata or Firewire 800.
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Donald HughesApr 7 '10 at 0:33

well, in addition to the slower bus, the drives themselves are WD Green drives that run at 5900 rpm. For basic file storage and iTunes library, this is plenty fast.
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warrenkoppApr 7 '10 at 0:56